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Sean Daily is an English major from New Jersey now living in Las Vegas, the Other City of Lights. "I consider 'Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas' to be comfort reading, I like the al pastor tacos at Tacos Mexico and I count among my literary influences the Chainsaw from 'Doom'. 'RRRRRR! You don't like that, do you, Mr. Undead Marine! RRRRRR!'"

Shanoah Alkire is our Discordian at large. "Born in Santa Cruz, I grew up in Grass Valley and the Bay Area, and now lurk in Las Vegas. My literary influences include Ray Bradbury,
Lewis Carroll, and Douglas Adams. I also program as a hobby,
and currently maintain the Gtk port of Angband. You can find
a rather old bio of me here."

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Posts Tagged ‘Sesame Street’

I HAVE RETURNED! I have swum through endless oceans of time and space, past the universe, past reason, PAST SANITY! in search of wisdom! knowledge! good schools! reasonable access to public transportation! AND WISDOM! I have sat with elders of a gentle race this world has seldom seen and talked of days for which they sit and wait, when all will be revealed. Ooooo, and it was heavy, baby! I BRING YOU!…

Um…

(searches pockets)

…Some crumpled cocktail napkins, half a circus peanut and a spiral-bound notebook with “BEWARE THE MIDGET” scrawled on every square inch.

Hmm.

Y’know, I was kind of thinking this Prometheus thing would be way cooler than this…

Anyway, you’re probably wondering why you haven’t seen me here since, dear gods, since August. Well, one reason is that I was just burned out from blogging. It happens… usually with a little more warning than I gave. I can’t believe that anyone missed me, but if you did, I’m sorry.

But I have another, much more legitimate reason for not blogging (at least for the last month)! That’s right, it’s National Novel Writing Month! 50,000 words in 30 days! Pure hell! Now I know what those American POWs felt like on the Bataan Death March… if those POWs had been forced to type over 200 pages of Courier New 12-point in 30 days! “Raust schnell, American dog! Your metaphors are trite and your plot derivative! Another night in The Box for YOU!” [1]

And you know what? I did it. I have a first draft of an urban fantsay novel about revisionist dragons, complete with one character undergoing a sex change when I realized I needed a romantic subplot. Now all I need is about 20 rewrites, and I’ll have my first novel!

But I think, in honor of my novel about revisionist dragons, I think I’ll go with a short about revisionist dragons. This is Ritterschlag from the Institute for Animation, Visual Effects and Digital Postproduction Film Academie of Baden-Württemberg, the only movie that dares ask the question: “Why do dragons keep kidnapping fair damsels?”

Today is an auspicious occasion, as well. Do you know why? Besides it being my sister’s birthday (Happy Birthday Lynn!).

This is the fiftieth anniversary of the Day the Music Died, when Buddy Holly, Ritchie Valens and J. P. “Big Bopper” Richardson died in a plane crash near Clear Lake, Iowa [1].

I’m not going to torture you with any Holly, Valens or Big Bopper in this post. Nor am I going to torture you with The Song That Should Have Ended Five Hours Ago, Don McLean’s American Pie, which is where “The Day the Music Died” comes from (I think). If you’ve been anywhere near a radio today, you’ve probably heard enough Holly, Valens, Big Bopper and Rode My Chevy To The Levy But The Levy Was Dry to last you a lifetime [2].

Instead, I think I’m going to fulfill my family obligations (you know, for a change of pace) and wish my sister a Happy Birthday… with the help of Ernie from Sesame Street, of course. [3]

Monsters, eh? Well, what monster could be more terrifying, more awe-inspiring, more blood-chilling and unmanning than, er, an alligator?

Why, the ALLIGATOR KING, of course!

Needless to say, this is The Alligator King, with animation and music by longtime Sesame Street animator William “Bud” Luckey (you may know his voice better as that of agent Rick Dicker in The Incredibles from Pixar, where he currently works). It’s funny how memory works. I don’t think about The Alligator King for something like two decades, but I see it once and suddenly I’m hopped up on Honeycomb cereal again, bouncing up and down, annoying the hell out of everyone and waiting for Sesame Street to be over so I can switch over to WPIX-TV for Battle of the Planets.

So, Sesame Street, hmmm? Well, let’s see what YouTube has… ah! I like the name of this song.

This, courtesy of Clausule, is I Want a Monster to Be My Friend, performed by Betty Lou (Marilyn Sokol). It’s been around since at least 1975, when it was included on an LP entitled The Sesame Street Monsters!, and is one of the few Sesame Street songs that I can think of that has a torch singer in it.

It’s also remarkable for the fact that it’s one of a large number of songs that have been banned from Sesame Street. According to Muppet Wiki:

The song was removed from rotation on Sesame Street in 1984, after a mother complained about the song’s bridge:

If I make friends with a friendly monster,
I’ll let him bounce me on his knee.
I’ll let him do whatever he wants ta,
Especially if he’s bigger than me.

These lyrics, interpreted in an unwholesome way, could be seen as encouraging children to give in to physical demands made by adults. A New York Times article on April 9, 1984, summarized the situation:

The monster song on the children’s television program Sesame Street is about to lose four lines because of a mother who feared they would encourage child molestation. Marty Deming, a mother of two, objected to the lines. She said Edward L. Palmer, vice president of the Children’s Television Workshop, told her Sesame Street will stop using the lines, even though the producers felt the song “has nothing to do with encouraging children to let real adult persons make improper advances on them.”

Now, let’s step back a bit and consider this. This song has been out there since at least 1975, and neither you nor I nor God Almighty has ever heard one case of a molested or abused kid telling the cops, “B-but Betty Lou said what the bad man did was okay!” But one silly little hausfrau in desparate need of a life files a complaint at least nine years after the song was released, and it gets pulled?

And it’s only gotten worse. Now the earlier seasons are being released with a parental warning sticker.

The first few seasons have just been released and come with, of all things, a warning.

“These early Sesame Street episodes are intended for grownups and may not suit the needs of today’s preschool child,” the warning reads.

“Sesame was created in the ’60s, and it was a bit edgier, if you will,” said Sherrie Rollins Westin, executive vice president of Sesame Workshop.

What parent today would want their child to see kids running through a construction site or jumping on an old box spring? Scenes like the ones included on the new DVD would probably not make it into today’s program now.

“We wouldn’t have children on the set riding without a bicycle helmet,” Rollins Westin says.

And what’s that little girl doing with that man?

“In the very first episode, Gordon takes a little girl’s hand who he’s just met on the street, befriends her and takes her into his home to give her ice cream,” Rollins Westin said. “That’s something we wouldn’t do on the show today.”

Yeah. I mean, jeez, I watched Sesame Street, and look at how it ruined me. Now pardon me while I go bang my head on a wall.

Robin Williams? Yeah, he can be fun, and there’s probably a million clips of him out there. Here’s one of his appearances on Sesame Street in the 80’s:

As you can tell, he’s clearly an expert on what is and isn’t alive. And I swear you can hear faint laughter in the background near the end.

I did want to play some music today, though, and as long as I’m doing Sesame Street, how about some clips from back in the days when they were filled with clever people doing song parodies and taking chances, rather then being filled with Elmo. Things like this were probably what got the Sesame Street dvd’s a Parental Advisory sticker.

Rebel L

Isn’t this great? I might actually like this better then Billy Idol’s “Rebel Yell”. “I’m just a Rebel L without a cause”.I don’t know that anything like this would be produced in a modern kids show.

A New Way To Walk

And, of course, there’s the fabulous, half naked Oinker Sisters. To warn you, this song can easily get stuck in your head. Of course, these days they would do it with Elmo, and Destiny’s Child. I wish I were kidding, but I saw the video. This is much better.

For today, I have two animations about cats, both of which were featured on Sesame Street in their day, though neither has any muppets or anything to distinguish their origin. And both strike me as fairly entertaining.

And do you notice that the meow at the end of the first one sounds like the same audio clip as the meow near the beginning of the second?

The Curious Cat

This one just has a certain groove factor to it. And, of course, I rather like the way the cat smirks. Reminds me of Shel Silverstein, somehow. The animation is by Michael Sporn.

The Hungry Cat

This one’s one I still remember as being hilarious. Poor desperate kitty cat. 🙂 Annoyingly enough, the better quality copy of this got removed, so I had to hunt up another one. The animation on this is by Dan Haskett.

Seven videos in one post? I suppose nothing cheers you up faster then torture and death…

Today, I thought I’d share something I found interesting. Did you know Sesame Street actually banned one of their pieces due to parental complaints in 1984? See what you think of this:

I Want a Monster to Be My Friend

“Although they’re hairy and sometimes scary,
They have such soft and furry paws;
If I make friends with a friendly monster,
I’ll let him bounce me on his knee.
I’ll let him do whatever he wants ta,
Especially if he’s bigger than me.”

I don’t see anything inappropriate, do you?

And if it seems like Sesame Street comes up a lot, it’s because there were quite a lot of entertaining skits and songs on it that have lasting power, even after you have grown up.[1]

As such, why don’t I add a few more? You may recall the training techniques Yoda used on Luke, where he faced himself in a cave. But do you recall where that technique originated, in his earlier persona as Grover?

The Monster in the Mirror

This, incidentally, is the original version. A later version was done that had a bunch of celebrities in it.

Then there’s this great blues piece. On this one, I think the celebrity cameos make it, so I went with that version rather then the original. And I definitely remember seeing this a long time ago.

Weird fact: Mr. Hoots is voiced over by the same person who does Elmo’s voice (Kevin Clash).

Put Down the Duckie

[1] Reportedly, anyways. I’m not sure I’d want to be accused of having grown up, though, even if my 30th birthday is around the corner (April 14th).

Oh RAWK, you found Mah Nà Mah Nà. The weird thing is that I didn’t originally hear this one on The Muppet Show, but as a Flash animation on Newgrounds. It was a little cartoon of a blue guy/robot getting his head kicked off his body and the subsequent adventures that his body and head have to get reunited, and for the life of me I can’t find it.

But hey, that’s okay (and that’s a fact, ain’t it Jack?) cos that just gives me an excuse to put up a post that I’ve wanted to do for a while…

What Yoda was doing about 900 years before the Clone Wars! Turns out that he kinda bummed around the galaxy doing odd jobs, including those lost years as a male prostitute (hey, he’s just the right height for most of his customers – rim shot) before becoming a Jedi. In this rare holocron, courtesy of Jedi Master NantoVision, we see him doing one of those odd jobs: teaching juveniles of all races about Near and Far.

Oh come on, you didn’t know that Grover was Yoda? The superpowers, the Force flight, the knight’s helmet… none of that clued you in?